The Big Parade is a movie in two parts: the first a kind of romantic comedy about soldiers encamping in a village in France during WWI, and the second an extended horrific look at the war they fight. The first half helps you get to know and love the men who will be shot at, bombed, machine gunned, and terrified in the second half.
Each half contains big sweeping emotions, but Vidor also excels at zooming in and showing detailed…
This maudlin movie doesn’t have much more to offer other than being historically important as the first feature length movie with synced speech and singing.
The climax, where Jolson struggles between choosing between his ethnic identity as a Jew or his showbiz career, occurs while Jolson is in blackface. Besides being deeply offensive then and now, anything the movie is trying to say is undercut by it leaving this other impersonation unexamined. The fact that the actor who plays the…
A movie that had every opportunity to become over sentimental and bombastic instead chooses a modest insightful curiosity. I liked it a lot more than adjacent movies like Before Sunrise, etc. because of that.
More action than comedy, but incredibly inventive when doing either or both. You’d think a chase movie involving two trains would be boring, but Buster Keaton continually invents new ways for the trains to be nearer or farther or in front of or behind each other. Track switches, falling trees, roadblocks, and famously a burning bridge all come between the two trains. In the middle of the chaos Buster is always graceful and stone faced, moving from one bit to the next.
